I couldn't find much to write about in the past week and change. But with the NBA playoffs coming up soon, there has been an interesting development in the league that is quickly becoming the biggest headline: the Heat are losing games, they can't keep pace with Chicago. Can they pull it together and win a championship? Wait...that's been the headline of the NBA for the past two seasons.
In this most recent addition of "The Heat can't cut it", the Heat have gone 3-4 while trying to make a push for the Eastern Conference's top seed. Of greater note is the fact that three of those four losses came to the Boston Celtics (twice) and the Chicago Bulls. The fact that as the season winds down, and the Heat are unable to beat other playoff teams from the East gives some people concern (or fills them with glee). Bill Simmons even took the time to write a column about how his beloved Celtics are back, and that they could mess with the Heat in a playoff series if they stay healthy. Sorry, not gonna happen. Because while I'm no expert on the NBA, I watch enough to know that the regular season is mostly meaningless.
In the NBA's regular season, getting into decent position in the playoffs is the only concern. It is a rarity to have a game in which both teams really play hard on a given night in the NBA. Take this BS Report podcast with Steve Nash, who talks about in a normal NBA season, having "scheduling losses", losses that a team basically just surrenders due to the grind of its schedule at that time. Yeah, sometimes in the NBA teams don't really show up. When they do, it's fantastic. That is why the playoffs are so entertaining. Because teams and players are giving it everything they've got in the playoffs. That's also why the regular season can't really be used to evaluate a playoff bracket.
Take Lebron James' first team for example. In the two years before James left for Miami, the Cleveland Cavaliers had the best record in the NBA and lost in the playoffs. In 2009, the Cavs were an unbelievable 66-16 in the regular season, but were dispatched pretty easily by the Orlando Magic in the Eastern Conference Finals. If not for a buzzer-beater by James in game 2, that would have been five game series. A 66-16 team was manhandled. Orlando, despite its inferior regular season record, was the better team. In the next year, everyone knows what happened. Cleveland went down to the Boston Celtics in six games, and Lebron "quit" in game 5. (This is an argument for another time, but I watched the game, and just don't agree that he had already quit on the Cavs. Look at his game 6 stats for at least some evidence). Whether or not James had given up, what always seems to be lost in that story is that clearly, the Celtics were a much better team than they were given credit for during the regular season. Everyone thought the C's beating the Cavs was an incredible upset, but then the Celtics beat the Magic easily, and almost won the Championship over the Lakers. It seems obvious to me that the Celtics flipped a switch in the playoffs and started playing real basketball. They just wanted to get into position, and when that happened, with all their veterans, become the team they knew they were capable of being.
So what was it about those Cavs that made them so good in the regular season but unable to get over the hump in the playoffs? The answer is simple: they played hard every night in the regular season. Players like Anderson Varejao hustled like crazy every night and were awarded as All-Stars in the regular season. But the playoffs started, and the Varejaos of the world start going against guys who are more athletically gifted, more talented and now playing just as hard, and things got ugly. (Varejao's career stats: 7.3 points, 7.2 rebounds. His career playoff numbers: 6.0 points, 5.6 rebounds (according to databasebasketball.com). In 2009-10, Varejao averaged 8.6 points and 7.6 rebounds. In the playoffs that year, he went for 5.7 points and 6.5 rebounds. In both cases, he played less minutes per game than during the regular season, but that is just as telling as the decrease in numbers: Varejao couldn't get the job done quite as well anymore).
Now look at last season, in which the Heat were the second seed in the East behind the Bulls. Miami went 0-3 against Chicago in the regular season, and it looked like Chicago had a serious mental edge. But then after losing game one, Miami reeled off four straight wins in relatively easy fashion, burying the Bulls in the fourth quarter each time. The Heat proved it was a better team than Chicago was.
Given the way this NBA season has gone, there's no reason to expect a different result in the playoffs. The Bulls almost exactly the same team as last year: a hard-playing group of most good players that operate around one unbelievable superstar. They have managed to win without Derrick Rose this year, which might be better for the Bulls come playoff time, but it's unlikely. When everybody is playing as hard as Taj Gibson and Joakim Noah are, Chicago looks a whole lot more pedestrian. And when everybody in Miami is playing that hard, the Heat will become a whole new animal, similar to last year.
Hopefully it will still result in a team on a mission from the West dispatching them in the NBA Finals, so the Heat narrative can continue.
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